WHAT'S THE QUALITY OF YOUR WEB SITE?
A good web site receives thousands of visitors a day. But how
many of those turn into customers? People sign-up or buy when
they feel comfortable with a web site. If it's down, slow, or
broken in any way, the visitor will usually be uncomfortable and
go elsewhere. Why? Well, do you like to shop in a retail store
that is missing products, has no customer service, or you can't
navigate? Probably not.
Many web sites have the equivalent of these situations, only
they are represented to visitors as problems with the site.
Remember your web site does the talking for you and visitors
make judgments strictly on their experience at your site. When
things do work the way they should work, the sign-up or checkout
process is simple, the product or service is not confusing, and
the whole experience feels right - the result is customers. If
this is the ultimate goal, corporate web site managers and web
site owners must treat their web site with the same care they
would a physical store or office. In the virtual world we don't
have store managers, but we do have a relatively new emerging
business category: online monitoring.
Online monitoring services mind the site/store and make sure
it's open and ready to do business 24 hours a day, every day.
These services can watch site performance, content,
availability/reliability, and security. They can also provide
site managers with immediate notification of problems via
alerts. By watching a site from outside the firewall and not
inside, online monitoring services identify problems that cannot
be immediately seen from the inside.
Monitoring services can't assure you that your site will be
financially successful, but they will help you maximize the
quality, which is vital to any successful web site and web
strategy.
Listed below is a checklist of things to consider when selecting
and purchasing online monitoring services.
1.How is the service provider connected to the Internet? 2.How
reliable is the monitoring services? Is it truly 24 x 7? 3.Is
this their core business or is it an add-on to other web based
services? 4.Call or email their customer service and see how
quickly they respond. 5.Does the service monitor overall
performance or just up/down? 6.Does the service reliably
identify most site problems? How do you know? 7.Are the alerts
and reports accurate and timely? 8.Does the service provide
enough real information to debug the site problem? 9.Can you
afford to subscribe to an online monitoring system? Can you
afford not to?